f8 keynote: Facebook’s revamped profile is called Timeline

Facebooks’ f8 keynote is in full force right now in San Francisco. There’s been a lot of anticipation as to what Facebook would announce today, and after yesterday’s changes, which made people quite unhappy, Facebook users were hoping CEO Mark Zuckerberg would surprise us with some very welcome improvements.

The first big thing Zuck announced is a new Facebook profile design called “Timeline.” Zuckerberg called the profile the “heart of the Facebook experience.” It’s where you put all your stuff, and he said millions of people spend a lot of time building and personalizing their profile. Zuckerberg called the Timeline “the story of your life.” The Timeline has three parts to it: Stories, apps, and a new way to express who you are.

Timeline is more or less a virtual scrapbook of everything you’ve ever done on Facebook. The new profile layout allows you to show all the stories of your life in a single page. You might be wondering how it can list stories about your childhood if you’re 30 years old and Facebook was only released in 2004? You can tell Facebook when you were born and literally add photos and events into your Timeline, dating from present day back to the day you were born.

Unlike the current Facebook profile that shows only your recent activities on your wall, Timeline shows all the stuff you did recently and summarizes all of the important stuff from the rest of your life. Facebook must have a pretty crazy algorithm to be able to pick out what it thinks are the most important parts of your life. The things Facebook thinks are important will show up on your Timeline with a blue dot. There are also grey dots that feature less important things like comments. You can hover over the grey dots to see what they are, and if you feel there’s something important in the grey dot, you can mark it with a star. This will then show up on your Timeline.

Also, you can simply add events and photos by clicking on various parts of the timeline. From what Zuck showed us during the keynote, the Timeline looks just as good on a mobile device.

There are tons of new features that fit into Timeline — like apps, photos, and design — that we’ll get into in further posts. Until then, check out the video below to see what a Timeline looks in action.